Campbell Corner Language Exchange
An Iliad for Our Time:
Walcott's Caribbean Epic
William Shullenberger
From Humanities Vol 22, No 6
(The Magazine of the National Endownment for the
Humanities, 2001)
Although
we tend to assign the epic to the literary past
as a bygone genre, Derek Walcott's Omeros, published
in 1990, asserts the ongoing power of the epic
to claim our attention and shape our understanding.
The epic is a monumental literary form-an index
to the depth and richness of a culture and the
ultimate test of a writer's creative power. Homer's
Iliad stands at the beginning of the epic tradition
in western culture, and Walcott's Omeros is that
tradition's most recent expression. The epic is
a collective memory of a people, offering poetic
memory as a way to transcend the afflictions and
losses of history. Homer, for instance, marks
the differences and continuities between Greeks
and Trojans, and Walcott represents the lives
of Caribbean people in the waning of the colonial
period. The grace, beauty, and imaginative strength
of Omeros depends in good part on Walcott's insightful
reading and rewriting of Homer. Walcott is an
example of how a contemporary writer can make
a place for himself in the literary tradition
and harvest its power for his own creative authority.
But literary influence is not a one-way street.
T.S. Eliot describes the relationship this way:
"What happens when a new work of art is created
is something that happens simultaneously to all
the works of art which preceded it. The existing
monuments form an ideal order among themselves,
which is modified by the introduction of the new
(the really new) work of art among them." So,
Walcott, in his "really new work," revises our
relation to Homer. Walcott's rewriting of Homer's
epic leads contemporary readers back to the ancient
texts to discover persistent human themes and
complex literary strategies. It sharpens our attention
to structures of imaginative, moral, and social
power articulated in the Iliad. Reading the two
poems together renews our awareness of the Iliad's
pertinence to our times, and renews our sympathy
for those remote and god like, yet deeply vulnerable,
characters who enact and suffer our ultimate concerns.
Whoever he may have been, whether a single integrative
genius or a convenient fiction to pin together
the accumulated work of generations of anonymous
bards, "Homer" sets the standard of the epic in
western culture. Walcott absorbs both the Iliad
and the Odyssey in his story, but the Iliad establishes
the high tragic tone that resonates through Omeros
and provides the central characters and conflicts
that Walcott refigures in his story. In the Iliad,
ten years of war at Troy are condensed into several
weeks. The savagery escalates at the time of Achilles's
sullen withdrawal from the fighting, and climaxes
in his explosive, terrible return. In Achilles's
absence, the battle shifts back and forth, affected
in unpredictable ways by divine interventions
and sudden outbursts of corage and skill from
heros on both sides. Achilles reluctantly permits
his beloved comrade Patroclus to enter the fighting
as a surrogate. His death at the hands of Hector
outrages Achilles, who blazes back into the action
with a bloodthirsty fury great enough to terrify
even the gods. The poem abounds in ironies. The
culture is founded and defended by the very virtues
which threaten to destroy it. Homer displays heroic
self-assertion as a double-edged virtue, a courageous
gesture of individual defiance against mortality
and all human contingency. But because one person's
aristeia is another's undoing, heroism ultimately
serves the impersonal and destructive force it
defies. Gift-giving and hospitality are binding
counterforces against individual heroism; for
the friendships forged by gifts and guests have
a stronger claim upon the hero than even kinship
or tribal loyalties. This is what made Paris's
abducxtion of Helen from Menelaus's household
a blasphemy great enough in the Greek estimation
to warrant ten years of slaughter. Walcott has
frequently developed analogies between the cultures
of Homer's Mediterranean and his own Caribbean;
Omeros relocated Homer's epic scene from ancient
Troy to the backwater Antillean island of St.
Lucia, and discovers the tragic grandeur and mythic
power of Homer's heroes in the fishermen and villagers
who harvest the all-nurturing sea and the fertile
but fickle earth for their lives subsistence.
The central Homeric characters of Omeros are Helen,
and Achille and Hector, brothers of the fishing
trade whose rivalry for Helen's extraordinary
beauty turns their friendship to murderous anger.
Women occupy particularly perilous and vulnerable
positions in the Iliad. From the fight over Helen,
which is manifest cause of the war, to the sparring
between Agamemnon and Achilles over the possession
of the mute captive Briseis, Homer shows women
as trophies, objects of exchange and contention-an
extreme form of the dehumanization to which all
are subject. In Omeros, Helen, like her Greek
prototype, is the great enigma and driving force
behind men's acts of courage and desperation.
Walcott heightens her mystery by providing the
reader little access to her thoughts. This reserve,
paradoxically, humanizes her, by allowing Helen
a kind of privacy of conscience unusual for a
literary character. The poet refuses to intrude
upon or speak for her experience, as he does for
his male heroes. Achille's desolation upon Helen's
abandonment of him takes himfurther and further
out to see-the "mer" in O-mer-os--until the search
compels him on an odyssey through time and space
to an inland village of upriver Benin. Here he
relivesx the slave raid that dispossessed his
ancestors of home, name, and past. He returns
to St. Lucia a changed, self-possessed man, ready
to live with his losses. Meanwhile, Hector's anxiety
about Helen's love and his compulsion to keep
her in modern style drive him to give up the sea,
to sell his canoe and to buy a souped-up transport
van, with space-age customized painting and leopard
skin seats, to taxi people about the island. The
pressure for money, the longing for the sea, and
remorse over his fight with Achille ultimately
propel Hector over a sea cliff to his death. Helen
and Achille are reconciled, and the poem ends
with Helen preparing to give birth and Achille
returning to harvest the thrashing silver of the
inexhaustible sea. Walcott crosscuts several other
stories into the primary tale, among them that
of the lame Philoctete waiting for a cure for
the festering sore on his foot, emblematic of
the psychological wound of slavery. Other stories
show the deep love for the island cultivated by
the expatriates Dennis and Maud Plunkett, and
the displaced poets own odyssey in search of a
place to call home. The poet's journey, like Achille's,
is temporal as well as geographical: he goes back
in time to encounter his mother and father, and
out into the world to confront the imposing cultural
mystique and trace the waning boundaries of a
European empire. Homer appears as a character
in various guises in Omeros: as the blind grizzled
fisherman Seven Seas, as a crazy vagrant kicked
about Trafalgar Square, as the great American
painter Winslow Homer, as the Liffey-haunting,
dandified ghost of James Joyce, as the griot of
a West African Village, and as a Sioux prophet
at the time of the Ghost Dance. But Homer surfaces
most powerfully in the sublime hexameters of Walcott's
verse, making the poet himself the most inclusive
and self-conscious of the Homeric figures he stitches
into the poem. Walcott employs what T.S. Eliot
called the "mythic method," using the narrative
spell of myth to organize and dignify the potential
chaos and insignificance of modern secular life.
But he does so in the self-questioning way of
a modernist aware of the potential falsehoods
and nostalgias of mythmaking. He creates a poem
on a heroic scale, with the scape of the Homeric
epics, but also with the self-conscious interventions
and the narrative fragmentation characteristic
of modernism. He sustains the tone of grandeur,
weaving together a fabric of seemingly incompatible
styles: the high sublime of Homeric declamation
and of English visionary poetry with the nimble,
syncopated Creole patois, chants, and challenges
of St. Lucia's streets, bars, and seafronts. Walcott
achieves that blend of objectivity and implicit
compassion that gives Homer's poems such tragic
dignity, and, like Homer, he imagines the poem
itself as a heroic act, a sustained meditation
on history, capacious enough to register its deepest
losses and powerful enough to claim that art can
transcend them. In Omeros, as in the Iliad, we
see history transfigured into myth, even at the
moment of its fading, and Helen's bitter lament
in the Iliad for herself and Paris could stand
as an epigraph for the central figures of both
poems: "Zeus planted a killing doom within us
both, / so even for generations still unborn /
we will live in song."
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